The Sound Of Distant Ringing

In the days before I learned to concentrate on a full length book, I used to have a Boy’s Own Annual that I flicked through occasionally. Sandwiched between the comic strips and activity pages, it had a 4-page spread of illustrated ghost stories that struck me as being a bit out of place, in the way that ghost stories often do. 

 

 

One in particular really disturbed me, about a woman who fell so ill that she was mistaken for dead.The mourners were really shocked when she sat up dramatically in the coffin at her own funeral. As the days went on, she was so shaken by the experience that she arranged in her will to have an electric bell installed in her coffin in case the same thing ever happened again. After her death, the bell kept ringing in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. Experts opened the grave and checked the electrics many times but they could never find a reason for the strange malfunction… 

The Writing in the Mirror – a review of 'Tenet'

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“

Walter Benjamin on ‘The Angel of History’

There's something which happens in the opening minutes of Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet (2020) that in retrospect, now seems utterly extraordinary: We see an audience taking their seats in a packed European opera house, as an orchestra is tuning up for a live performance.